Posted on 05/11/2011 10:40:29 AM PDT by jazusamo
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Wednesday vowed to hold a vote on legislation creating a route to legal residency — and ultimately citizenship — for illegal-immigrant students.
Reid declined to say when the DREAM Act might reach the floor, but he nonetheless urged lawmakers to support the bill, if only for the economic benefits he said it would bring.
"Instead of kicking out of our country people who are educated," Reid said, "we should let them work."
Supporters of the DREAM Act have a long road ahead. Although the House passed the proposal in December, it fell five votes short of defeating a largely Republican filibuster in the Senate. Those hurdles are even higher in the 112th Congress, with Republicans controlling not only more seats in the upper chamber, but also the House gavel.
Reid said he is not discouraged and called on Republicans to rethink their opposition that sunk the legislation in December — particularly those who've supported similar legislation in the past.
"We ask the Republicans of good will to step forward and work with us on this," he said.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) suggested Wednesday there's a chance immigration reform could happen soon.
"I don't put it at a majority chance, but there's a chance. We're still talking — I'm talking to both business and labor about this bill," Schumer told Bloomberg. "I'm talking to my Republican colleagues, and I think the Republican Party realizes that the position of doing nothing on immigration doesn't help them. Furthermore, there's becoming an economic imperative.
"More and more people are realizing that our broken immigration system is an economic drag on the country, and I think there's a chance we could get a bill," Schumer said.
Daniel Strauss contributed.
This post was updated at 11:57 p.m.
I’ve been getting new information from an ex-FBI guy on Reid taking bribes that fits with other information I have. No one seems to want to pick up the story, perhaps a fear factor. Click my name for more on my bio of Harry Reid.
Get ready for an executive order.
If this is done you can count on a summer of outrage by the very people O is pandering to.
Black unemployment is at record highs.
Hispanic legal immigrants are enraged at this backdoor amnesty.
Reid’s supporters:
Homosexuals
Transsexuals
Illegal Aliens
Supporters of Infanticide
Prostitutes
Just setting up the the “republicans are anti-latino” meme for the 2012 elections.
Hmmmm, must be an election comming up.
Anybody see Reid’s shiner? Did one of the Obama girls kick his ass again?
An EO wouldn’t be surprising.
He keeps saying he doesn’t want to use it on this but he lies—continually.
You DON'T think that's exactly what they want? they WILL have riots in the streets preceding the November 2012 elections..because they have nothing else to offer the American people and their constituents. They won't be running against gas at $5.00/gal...they'll lose ..and they know it. Their only option is to create enough chaos -such that $5.00/gal gas is the LEAST of the problems entering the election cycle-that opportunity may fall out of it.
At they will engage a complicit malpracticing media to blame it all on “Republicans”....
Liberalism = Economic + Cultural Suicide
Anytime I see Reid in a headline, I wonder where the “Aw, Jeeze!” fellow is.
Exactly. The illegals coming in from the south are not the "educated."
May I ask a possibly stupid question about Constitutional process. The previous House passed the Dream Act..is the present House bound by it?..Can the curent House overturn it? Or does that mean than any bill ever passed by ONE body of Congress is always viable, and could be brought up by the other body decades, heck, centuries later on?
Yep, they’re appealing to RINO’s but they’ve already spoken, this is a last ditch effort by Dingy Harry and Chuckie.
“Hurdles” = those pesky American voters.
I don’t think that’s a stupid question, I don’t know either.
I do know if anything in the Senate bill is different than the one passed in the House it has to go back for another vote.
Hopefully if it would be passed in this Senate it would have to be passed in the new House also.
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